Edinburgh Girl

My best piece of advice for anyone travelling South East Asia would be; avoid at all costs the 24 hour overnight bus from Vientiane in Laos to Hanoi in Vietnam. Don't be sucked in by the cheap price and wanting to have an experience of ‘roughing it' on your travels. It's not worth it, just give in to luxury and get a flight! Our Bamba Bus timetable said it would be 22 hours, then our confirmation email said 24 hours and then the whole journey ended up taking 25 hours! It was 25 hours of hell! We got on the bus at 5pm, it didn't leave until 6pm, stopped once at 10pm, pulled up at the Vietnam border around 2/3am then waited until border controlled opened at 6am with no air con on the bus! I went and asked the bus driver if he could open the door for some air but he had no clue what I was saying! It took us three hours to get through both the Laos and Vietnam immigration then we were back on the road at 9am, we had a stop at 2pm and then finally arrived in Hanoi at 7

After our rocky journey to Vang Vieng, our journey on to Vientiane was absolutely fine. We got chatting to a nice English couple in front of us and who were actually on the same slow boat as us from Thailand to Laos. When we got dropped off we arranged to meet the couple later on for some drinks. Our hotel was only a 10 minute walk away from where we were dropped off using the Maps Me app. Maps Me is officially now my new favourite app! You download the map of the country you want when you have Wi-Fi and then after this you can use the map through your GPS. This is excellent to use when you are in a foreign country as you can only use your Maps app on your phone when you have Wi-Fi as usually most people won't have 3G to use abroad. This way with Maps Me as long as you have Wi-Fi to download the map of the country then you can search for places and directions to somewhere without needing 3G. We had picked a pretty good hotel for our stay here in Vientiane as it